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We have google fiber at home - Stanford faculty homes have had it the past year, like Kansas City. It's pretty cool. My record so far is to consume 400Mbps, u
by nilsbunger 14y ago
We have google fiber at home - Stanford faculty homes have had it the past year, like Kansas City.
It's pretty cool. My record so far is to consume 400Mbps, using 4 computers downloading from about 10 places, all wired through gigabit switches.
In practice, though, it doesn't make much difference compared to a 30Mbps cable modem for most consumers:
most streaming video is < 10 Mbps;
large file downloads are generally limited by a server (or somewhere else in the network?), so it's hard to exceed 30-40Mbps download speed;
web browsing feels about the same, because it's limited by round trips of DNS and http requests, not by bandwidth (spdy will help here?);
many consumer-grade NAT boxes (linksys and friends) are capable of only 100-200 Mbps
The one place it's made a big difference so far is uploads. For example, backup to a cloud backup service (backblaze) often goes 50Mbps or higher. But I did have to try several backup services because some were limited on the server side to a few Mbps.
Running services from home could be a use case too, but then you get into reliability of power/etc, and the fact that so far you can't get a static IP address through google fiber.
So for now google fiber is mostly a fast cable modem from a "don't be evil" provider. I think the real disruption will come with new services that don't really exist yet. What kind of new things can be built if there's enough audience?
- epikur 14y agoWhat cloud backup provider did you settle on? Dropbox has very slow uploads for me, so I'm curious what else is out there that works.
- nilsbunger 14y agoBackblaze. But it's really cloud backup, not storage/sync like dropbox.
- ghshephard 14y agoBackblaze has been a rock star for me over a year. It used to be very, very slow (My first backup took the better part of a week to get the "Initial" image in place) - but it was okay because their constant background backups only needed around 1 mbit to be effective (and, more importantly to me - invisible. Time Machine had a bad habit of ramping up my CPU). But, recently, they must have made modifications to their system - because I routinely see backup in excess of 15 mbits/second. Highly recommended.
- msy 14y agoI'm finding spideroak superior to backblaze - it actually backs up my entire system rather than skipping /Library & /opt and allows me to backup external drives without needing to have them constantly plugged in. I think the pay-for-what-you-use model allows them to be a lot more flexible.
- dpcx 14y agoWith an internet connection like that, CrashPlan might be more interesting. The fact that you could back up to a friends computer would be nifty to test.
- eavc 14y agoAre downloads of torrents similarly limited or does the distributed nature allow for much higher speeds?
- nilsbunger 14y agoThat's a great question! Downloading a 1GB file, I peaked at 65 Mbps download rate just now. It ramped up slowly over a period of a few minutes. I was connected to 58 of 60 peers to get that rate.
- fratis 14y agoSorry if this is obvious, but to clarify: is that around 8 MB/s? Or did you mean 65 MB/s?
- nilsbunger 14y agoYes, 8 MBytes/sec, or 65 Mbits/sec.
- jmreid 14y agoMost new home routers will route much more than 100-200 Mbps: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/router-charts/index.php http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/router-charts/index.ph... I have the Asus RT-N66U, which is rated on that chart for 730+ Mbps (of course, QoS will bring that down). Even the AirPort Extreme is rated for 400+ Mbps, but not QoS to speak of.
- GICodeWarrior 14y agoSome of those number are higher than I expected. Though, I am not sure it is a representative sample of what you will find on a store shelf. Also, less than half of the list is above 200mbps, let alone "most" or "much more". Array.prototype.map.call(document.querySelector('table.chart').querySelectorAll('td.number'), function(speed) { return parseFloat(speed.textContent) > 200 ? '>200' : '<=200'; }).reduce(function(previous, next) { previous[next] = (previous[next] || 0) + 1; return previous; }, {}) => { "<=200": 40, ">200": 37 }